In the world of workfare, ‘voluntary’ of course means ‘we’ll sanction you if you refuse’. And if your JSA is sanctioned, it can interrupt other claims such as for housing benefit and cause serious cash-flow problems for claimants. The LSE professor who devised the New Deal was made a Labour peer – Baron Layard – and loads of private sector firms (many with links to Labour) got on the gravy train as ‘providers’. Notionally, this was about ‘helping’ people back to work in a context of relatively full employment and economic growth. The whole thing merrily rolled along until the recession hit, when the scheme was revamped and continued to do exactly the same thing – mandatory unpaid work on pain of losing benefits. Bizarrely, the rhetoric demonising ‘scroungers’ has escalated in keeping with the ratio of jobseekers to jobs. As someone pithily put it on twitter, “JOBSEEKERS: Empirically, there are no jobs, but ideologically, we have potential full employment IF YOU WEREN'T SO LAZY.”

The Flexible New Deal was extraordinarily expensive, and lots of firms – not the claimants obviously – made a lot of money out of it. When the Tories axed the scheme, they claimed it cost £31,000 per job. They promptly replaced it with their own Work Programme, which is essentially a rebrand of the same thing, only switching the provider contracts (presumably now to Tory-linked firms). The Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) own report found that workfare is not at all effective in achieving its stated aims of getting the long-term unemployed back into work:

There is little evidence that workfare increases the likelihood of finding work. It can even reduce employment chances by limiting the time available for job search and by failing to provide the skills and experience valued by employers. (…) Workfare is least effective in getting people into jobs in weak labour markets where unemployment is high.

So either successive governments and the ruling class in general are really stupid, and they keep pouring money into hugely expensive and ineffective schemes, or this really isn’t about ‘helping’ jobseekers and creating jobs at all. Another point strikes me here. Someone recently wrote on twitter that “you can’t have US levels of inequality without US levels of incarceration.” This really resonated with the plans to criminalise squatting, as well as the law and order backlash after the August riots. For context, below is a graph of the US prison population. The massive rise is more or less engineered by the ‘war on drugs’. The massive increase in prison capacity has been met by private firms, covering their costs with low wage prison labour, which is apparently a booming sector of the economy, particularly for war production (helmets, webbing etc).

• provide employment places for some 10,000 prisoners in 370 workshops;
• provide some 12 million hours of activity per year;
• have an estimated value of production of over £30 million at market pressures, largely saving the Service external procurement and therefore releasing resources for other priorities;
• generate income of some £6.5 million per annum from external sales – mainly through contract services workshops.

Furthermore:

We now plan to increase the range of constructive work available to offenders inside prison, and in turn their job opportunities on the outside. We have an existing corporate alliance with more than 70 employers, in addition to those working in individual prisons and probation areas, but the Government is now committed to expanding this programme significantly.

These plans – bound up with the proposed Titan prisons – collapsed due to a failure to get planning permission. But they do demonstrate that an expansion of prison and prison labour is certainly on the mind of the ruling class. The prison-building programme has been questioned by projections showing incarceration levelling off. But the same report found tougher sentencing could see an additional 9,000 people locked up by 2016. So the plans are likely to re-emerge in some form. Even if prison-building stalls, there could well be a push to privatise prisons as part of wider public sector cuts. Private prison providers are likely to want to maximise their profits by leveraging cheap and compliant labour. It’s not hard to imagine G4S or their ilk running a prison and being told to balance the books by exploiting prison labour.

Of course, like workfare, low wage prison labour is ‘voluntary’. But compliance will certainly help your chances of an early release, while resistance could conceivably add to your sentence. What Erik Olin Wright says in 'The Politics of Punishment' about prisons could equally go for the logic of workfare:

Contemporary prisons in the United States can be described as liberal totalitarian institutions. The apparent paradox in this expression reflects the contradictions that pervade the life of prisons. They are institutions which, at least formally, have adopted the liberal goal of rehabilitation, while maintaining totalitarian control over the lives of prisoners. Moreover, they have adopted a variety of liberal programs (the indeterminate sentence, therapy programs) which in practice often serve to further the totalitarian goal of changing prisoners into strict conformists to authority.

Workfare is not prison (or the other common analogy, slavery). But there is a similar logic at work, which is at once liberal and totalitarian. Workfare notionally aims at reforming the unemployed into employable wage labourers through training and work experience. But in practice, it does little to help people find work, and even replaces minimum wage jobs with workfare ones (shelf stacking etc). That is to say its real object is to produce conformity to the diktats of the flexible labour market, both for those on it and those who fear falling into it. The ever-present threat of sanctions betrays the totalitarian aspect of workfare liberalism, and its supposed ‘voluntary’ nature (that wonderful phrase of ‘no informed consent required’).

Just over a decade ago, the shift towards workfare prompted a pamphlet titled ‘Stop the clock! Critiques of the new social workhouse.’ The title riffs on the idea of the social factory, a claim by dissident Marxists in the 1970s that the whole of society was replacing the factory as the site of both production and anti-capitalist struggle. The subsequent development of workfare, casualisation and prison labour fleshes out this claim. The workhouse is not the physical building of the Victorian era. It’s fast becoming a sector of the economy – or rather a tier of the labour market – in its own right. Those who fall through the cracks of normal wage labour (itself nothing to write home about), are increasingly being forced to work for their dole, or perhaps even criminalised and facing prison labour.

The whole thing is vastly expensive to the ‘taxpayer’, but for precisely that reason serves as a massive state subsidy to private capital. Directly, it provides cheap labour to businesses. Indirectly, it undercuts the minimum wage and disciplines those in waged work not to rock the boat lest they be cast into workfare. Perhaps the new social workhouse is a harbinger of an emerging state capitalism to compete with the low wage economies of South and East Asia. After all, the ‘knowledge economy’ turned out to be mostly hot air, and India has far more English-speaking graduates than the UK anyhow. Or maybe that’s just one possibility – if we don’t kill off workfare in its relative infancy.

Refusal of unpaid work is running at about 50% amongst claimants. However this was seen as a success by the government in cutting the dole bill, as refusal stops benefits. So ‘the refusal of work’ in itself doesn’t seem a viable strategy. In fact, the government seems to be counting on it to cut the welfare bill. But on another front, already Waterstones and Sainsbury’s have pulled out of workfare nationally. Poundland in Brighton pulled out after one picket. March 3rd is a national day of action called in solidarity with a Liverpool Uncut anti-workfare action. If the anti-workfare movement can capture half the momentum UK Uncut had at its peak, we could still derail workfare yet.

I think it varies. Some of the national chains are saying it was at the discretion of local/regional managers and not national policy (though this may be back peddling). and that refers to the 'work experience' programme (the 'voluntary' one that becomes mandatory after a week). In terms of the mandatory work programme, i think they've hived that out to regional contractors like Avanta, A4e et al who spend their time phoning up businesses from sole traders to big chains touting free labour. In the South East these are the firms known to be involved.

Benefits sanction apparently removed from Workfare scheme, although it still remains for those who commit what the employer considers 'gross misconduct' (which I imagine could be broadly applied).

One Trot on Facebook already declared that it's "beaten", but I told him to calm down. The programe still exists, it'll still push our wages down and it'll still be a mechanism for free labour. Let's hope this attitude doesn't infect the day of action on Saturday...

EDIT: more generally, does this represent the first time in <20 years that the British ruling class were forced to climb down by street-level political activity?

Removed from one aspect of the programme (the work experience for u-24s), leaving four that still have a mandatory element. I suspect this has a great deal to do with Chris Grayling making a dick of himself on C4 news last night.

I am currently 'on the sick', and will no doubt be subject to these kind of bullying and exploitative programmes.

I know peeps who have had all their Disability Living Allowance taken off them, and placed on work-focussed Employment Support Allowance or Job Seekers.

Also, a social worker and her team manager in the field of mental health, told me that even clients whose condition is so bad they have subject to hospitalization, are as a matter of routine, being placed straight on ESA. And if they are deemed incapable of work, they tend to be getting only 12 months on the sick before review, as opposed to the once customary 3 years.

Thanks for an exellent article.
Your analysis is spot on as far as I'm concerned which paints a pretty negative picture of actual government policy as opposed to the story we are sold.

The problem with demonising a section of the population like this is that it can be used to justify mistreatment.
How hard a kicking does the bad lazy unemployed person deserve?
If I kick the bad person hard enough will it fix every problem I ever had and that society faces?

My experience with the work programme has been bad.
What I have experienced is blatant bullying and sanctions as a consequence of objecting to the bullying.
As far as I'm concerned the bullying is a direct result of the governments' demonisation game which people are using to justify what they are doing.
Once abuse is justified at whatever level then any level of abuse can be justified using the same excuse.
To me this is the most worrying and dissapointing aspect of the whole thing.

This generalises out to any public facing government employee.
The government employs alot of people most of whom will likely not question the line they are fed and may well secretly revel in the fact that they have been provided with something they can kick around while a blind eye is turned to what they are doing.

One opinion I've come across is that the riots last summer were sparked in part by a "fresh round of demonisation" by the government.
Whether that is true or not I don't know but I rekon the government are building up a body of resentment with this that may well backfire.
Of course any troublemakers can be conveniently used as a scapegoat and given long harsh prison sentences in an effort to silence any "difference of opinion".

If you demonise someone and treat them badly would you expect them to react in a positive or negative way?
If they react in a negative way could you then use that to further demonise them?
Is this a good way to encourage negative behaviour in a person?
Are the government creating and amplifying negative aspects of this society because of their need for a convenient scapegoat?

Log in for more features

▶ Can comment on articles and discussions
▶ Get 'recent posts' refreshed more regularly
▶ Bookmark articles to your own reading list
▶ Use the site private messaging system
▶ Start forum discussions, submit articles, and more...